My heart leapt when I heard about the recall and production shutdown involving eight potentially fatally flawed models. Like the owners of runaway Toyotas, I, too, have yelled into the abyss trying to get Toyota to own up to a faulty gas pedal. (In our case the car would stop uncontrollably rather than go uncontrollably, a less scary but also dangerous phenomenon.) So the company's dramatic actions struck me as a blow for accountability over indecision.
My heart sank, however, when I saw that all the factories being shuttered are in North America. In other words, heads already have rolled, and they belong not to home-office executives but to host-country laborers.
I'm not quite cynical enough to suggest this is the point of the shutdown, but I think I know how it will be interpreted in Japan: Despite decades of tutelage, Americans still can't make a car; company leadership has been forced into this painful decision to prevent Americans from killing each other with their sloppiness.
In 1994 Tom Clancy published Debt of Honor, the plot of which involved a Japanese-American war sparked by popular outrage over exploding gas tanks in Japanese-made cars. Now that Japanese cars are American-made, laying blame across borders is harder to do -- which was precisely the p.r. brilliance of opening plants here.
But prejudices die hard, and I expect Toyota to come under fire not only here for making mistakes, but at home for allowing foreigners to make them.
I hadn't heard that they were shutting down factories here. I understand that they can't produce more of the same faulty cars, but don't they see how shutting down will undoubtedly negatively affect their public perception here even further?
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